Politics is the art of the possible.

What, to the American slave, is your Fourth of July? I answer: a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him your celebration is a sham.

Let him who desires peace prepare for war.

The poor have sometimes objected to being governed badly; the rich have always objected to being governed at all.

There is no method by which men can be both free and equal.

I shall be an autocrat: that’s my trade. And the good Lord will forgive me: that’s his.

It is a certain sign of a wise government and proceeding, when it can hold men’s hearts by hopes, when it cannot by satisfaction.

People revere the Constitution yet know so little about it—and that goes for some of my fellow senators.

I am invariably of the politics of the people at whose table I sit, or beneath whose roof I sleep.

In politics, what begins in fear usually ends in folly.

The first requirement of a statesman is that he be dull.

Democracy is the recurrent suspicion that more than half of the people are right more than half of the time.

He may be a patriot for Austria, but the question is whether he is a patriot for me.